Welcome back to school

This is one of our new place mats

Today we welcomed back our Flowers Class friends and teachers for the new school year. We were so glad to see many familiar faces and we counted four children today, who are the "old" Flowers Class guard, and twelve friends who joined the class for this school year. We were also happy to have two new friends who came to live in Japan recently. Our class is also filled with many different cultures that we are excited to learn about in International Months, later in the year e. g. England, Australia, Israel, America, Taiwan, South Africa, Philippines, Norway, India, France, Argentina, Japan and Serbia.

We started off our day engaged in Free Play, developing new relationships, signing in, finding jobs and getting used to a schedule that we know, and also one that has some new things in it. During the morning, we looked at the job chart and got to know some of the jobs that are available to choose from with "watering the plants" being a new one. We noticed that we have beautiful plants on our balcony and a fairy garden and are excited to have the opportunity to take care of the plants and play with the garden. "Watering the plants" is also about watering the plants on the deck outside the office.

Reading together during the morning

We made new place mats using unique borders that make each of our place mats, truly different. Those of us that remembered how to write our names, added them to our place mats together with a bowl, cutlery or chopsticks and some food. We used pictures of food from magazines for the food on our place mats.

We had fun singing our "Hello" song and we all remembered the words of the song. Shelley's face had a surprised look on it at the end of the song and she asked us: "Why do you think my face is surprised?" We thought that maybe someone had given her a present but this was not the reason. She was amazed that we had all remembered the words and felt proud of us and happy in her heart. We also sang "Tommy Thumb" and laughed when we had to hide our fingers behind our backs. We learnt a poem called "These are my ten little fingers".

With our theme being "Who we are", going forward for the next few months, we decided to use photos of our actual feet for the area where we usually line up to go to the bathroom or wash our hands. We will also take photos of our facial features and talk about what makes us who we are......is it something physical or is it our personality? Or is it something different?" We will have many discussions about this just like the ones we had about where we went during the summer vacation and what we did. All of our teachers spent time with us in small groups, asking us about what we did, what we saw etc. We will document this and then draw a picture of what we did.

You can see that even though it was a short day, settling back in after the long summer holidays, we had so much to say and so much to do.

Thanks for a fabulous start to the new school year. We are so glad to be back together in Flowers Class.